Animating collapse. Reframing colonial film archives

Résumé En

In a February 2016, the Brussels art school Ecole de Recherche Graphique (ERG) held its annual conference at Bozar, in Brussels. It was an opportunity for ERG and the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA, Tervuren, Belgium) to engage in structural cooperation on colonial archives worked out through artistic practices. Fundamental divergences quite quickly appearing between both institutions freezed them irremediably. This paper will focus on the consequences that this institutional collapse had on an artistic project based on colonial film archives. Migrating from an ethnography museum toward several European and African institutions dedicated to contemporary art the project engaged with new epistemological and political questions. We’ll observe the new fields that appeared by this itinerancy and its consequences on our respective works on that historical material. Focusing on animations realized by Alexander Schellow on the Armand Hutereau expedition in northern Congo, we’ll observe how this artistic work engage on our contemporary (in)accessibility of those historical images. The displacement of this visual material to the field of animation (as it is practiced by Schellow) opens up a critical reflection on the anthropological representations produced by the military expedition through the prism of our contemporary insights.